IRS deserves no benefit of doubt after email snafu: Editorial

It’s inexcusable for any government agency to lose important information, and especially indefensible for the Internal Revenue Service to claim to have lost records vital to a public investigation of its practices.

Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot. What would happen if you told IRS auditors that you’ve lost the records that could prove the case for you or against you? Think the auditors would shrug and say, “Well, these things happen,” and drop the whole thing?

They wouldn’t — and the IRS should expect no such presumption of innocence from the American people’s representatives in Congress after officials’ claim to have lost emails that could reveal more about the agency’s scrutiny of conservative groups.

The IRS has admitted that it gave improper attention to applications for tax-exempt status from tea-party and other political groups that oppose the Obama administration. Republicans in the House of Representatives have led investigations into whether the IRS was following orders from the administration.

Congressional committees asked for email records, and the IRS turned over tens of thousands of them. But this month the IRS told Congress that a June 2011 computer crash had caused the disappearance of batches of emails sent from and to Lois Lerner, who then was the head of the division that processed applications from groups seeking nonprofit tax exemption, and several other officials.

At this point, it is premature to call the missing emails the moral equivalent of the 18-minute gap in the Nixon White House tapes. It is unfair to say this is proof that IRS officials have engaged in a cover-up, that they are only pretending to have accidentally lost the emails.

But it is reasonable to say the development is a setback for the IRS’s defense in what this editorial board, more than a year ago, called the first serious scandal of the Obama administration.

It emboldens House committee chairmen, including Darrell Issa, R-Vista, and Dave Camp, R-Mich., chair of the Ways and Means Committee, to step up their investigations.

The emails could have shown as-yet-unproven communication between IRS and other federal officials. Or they could have shown nothing incriminating.

But the unintentional loss of thousands of emails, if that’s what happened, is itself a major foul-up. Waiting months to tell members of Congress is itself a big black eye.

The IRS says the emails in question were from 2009-11, when employees had to limit the number of emails in their queues by either deleting unneeded messages or moving them to their computers’ hard drives.

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By this account of what happened, Lerner’s computer crashed and the emails on her hard drive disappeared. Technicians tried to recover them but couldn’t.

Conveniently, one surviving email, in August 2011 from a technician to Lerner, does seem to show that a crash really happened.

This merely leaves a lot of big questions unanswered. Congressional probes will continue, and should. The IRS is not a department that should ask for the benefit of the doubt.